We can sequence genes. We can edit the sequence of many genes we've identified to switch the phenotype they express among meaningful choices. We can edit retroviruses to make them edit genes from A to B in living cells. We can combine sperm and egg IVF to produce a blastocyst. We can even insert full cell nuclei into collected foreign eggs, which we can cultivate into a blastocyst in a lab. We can convert skin cells into egg cells for that purpose.
How close are we to a synthetic womb that can gestate a full blastocyst into a newborn baby?
Evolution is only the change in a genome over time. The human genome increasingly contains genetic values that it had less of before, as they were less able to reproduce. That is evolution. It's "de-evolution" only according to your values, which don't count in measuring genetic change.
Nazis don't care about the genetics. They care about scapegoating people powerless to fight back. And then using their example to terrorize each and any other group they construct as the next target. None are spared.
BTW "nationalist socialist" countries are everywhere. The US has always offered "socialism" (government enforced wealth redistribution) mainly to its richest, and is about the most nationalist country behind N Korea. The UK, Norway, Switzerland and many other European countries are pretty socialist, though more equitable in the wealth redistribution source/destination, and are so nationalist they refuse to join the EU. Japan is pretty nationalist, and more socialist than the US.
If you're going to scare people with "nazi", just say "nazi". Stop trying to scare people about socialism, as if the Nazi socialism was representative of socialism any more than East Germany's "People's Republic" represented its people. Nazism was founded on propaganda, and sympathetic propaganda outlets continue to peddle its slanders today.
Even when a complete genome sequence run costs the lab $1000, it's going to cost the patient $100,000 on their bill. Because nothing exists in the medical industry to reduce the prices charged to patients. Even insurance corps' leveraging their own and their cartel's buying power to reduce prices paid to medical providers then slap their own extreme charges and fees (and waste) to raise the retail cost back up.
Though not as much in Europe. So Europeans will get to consume American medical exports like quick, cheap sequencing technology. Evolution in action.
No point exists for which curvature is zero in all reference frames. Since any reference frame in the Universe that has a mass in it exerts gravity on each point, there is no point at which there is 0 gravity. That's why I agree with that previous post. It might be reaching pretty far, but that is the point of having comprehensive theories of gravity - they reach as far as there is.
Yes, that's why the world depends on New Zealand's opinion.
The US of course depends on its automotive industry to drive our entire manufacturing industry, the core of the US economy. Our manufacturing that is still by far the largest in the world, about 20% of global output. Manufacturing employs about 20% of American workers. We invent most of the world's manufacturing techniques, materials and responses like recycling; most of the rest of global manufacturing uses American machinery and feeds America's manufacturing supply chain.
The US automotive industry is the epitome of all that. New Zealanders bought more Ford Rangers last month than any other model car; 5 other Fords were in the NZ Top 25. GM isn't as popular in NZ, but it's the world's biggest car company again, over 10% larger than Toyota. Meanwhile my wife has 2000s Toyota that should have been recalled, and we've watched the later model years of them turn to crap we'd never buy.
And then there's all the great cars made in Germany, which evidently you've never heard of. America might indeed be in pretty deep trouble. But you better hope not. Because if America's manufacturing does collapse around a cratered car industry, we'll stop spending the money shooting movies Americans drive to see. Then your Top 25 will be dominated by classic 1980s Yugos.
No, relativity says that all mass in the universe acts on all the other mass, even though the effect moves at the speed of light which is pretty slow over most of the vast universe, but most of the mass has already curved space by now since it has existed for so long. Newton's gravitation also says that all masses act on each other. Both of which models support my point that every point in the universe is affected by gravity, and there is nowhere that is "absolute zero gravity" as the comment to which I replied claimed.
Your point is irrelevant. The point, to which you replied, is that using Mint instead of the user doing what Mint did to Ubuntu, saves time.
You just tried to move the goalposts again to your point. And then you tried to "just saying" your way into moving them again into disagreeing that installing Mint saves time over installing Ubuntu and changing it yourself. Moving the goalposts again. And moving them into just being wrong.
You don't even know what you're arguing about, and you're wrong on what you want to argue about. Helping you perpetuate it is distasteful. That's all the help from me you'll get.
It clearly matters who is president of America Inc. As I pointed out, Republican presidents of it are intolerable, while Democratic presidents of it suck, but are tolerable. There's plenty of other supporting data. Like the GDP and the stock market each growing faster under every Democratic president than Republicans, since Eisenhower. Of course we can always do better. Then there's the warmonger record, which Republicans dominate (except are roughly equal on Vietnam, which is now just a middling war). It's absolutely false that the two parties are equivalent. And when there are only two on the ballot that can govern, let alone win, we have to be honest about which one is an unacceptable choice.
Of course America was designed for the Congress to primarily determine how much the country sucks, and Republicans are the source of most of the suck. If we call them "Conservative" (and its "Libertarian" flavor that's really "corporate anarchy"), we can include the Democrats who make the case for equivalence. This is the problem. But it's far too easy, because it's wrong, to say that it doesn't matter which party rules. When Republicans rule, all but a few suffer and pay for it. When Democrats rule, far fewer suffer.
Because we didn't have nearly the amount of mall rentacops as we had real cops. They didn't have the power of real cops. They mostly didn't even have guns. They didn't get sent to face the kind of threats that real cops face.
You are talking nonsense, and it's perfectly clear your libertarian trance cannot be broken. Enjoy your paradise in Somalia. Goodbye.
What a completely naive statement, completely ignoring all the ways in which rentacops suck far worse than government cops. To the point where rentacops generally aren't allowed the kind of power that government cops are allowed.
You do listen to what you say before you try to convince someone with your anarchist word salads, right?
At best all Obama did was continue the program. [...] Both Presidents Bush announced plans to go to Mars yet failed to provide any leadership in terms of getting funding to get it to happen or even building any infrastructure to make it happen.
Then again neither does Mitt Romney [really care to offer any real leadership]
Indeed that is why Obama deserves credit. He continued the programme. Despite also handling a catastrophic economic collapse that literally threatened to delete America's main industrial engine, the automotive industry. It took a lot of political capital and risk to continue that programme, instead of just lying about it the way those other presidents did.
the appointment of Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA was nearly the very last of any high level agency appointments made by Barack Obama, and the longest it took for any president since Eisenhower to appoint somebody into that position after taking office
Again, it's not easy spending money on something like NASA when the country is flooded by propaganda calling any government spending "socialism" during the biggest economic collapse in a lifetime. Appointing someone against that headwind, and NASA getting its various work done especially since a Republican Congress has insisted on interfering with anything Obama could take credit for (including killing Binladen), was real leadership.
So it's a good thing Obama will be defeating Romney in 6 months. That makes it look a lot better than if Romney and his party of Bush, Bush, Reagan (who did nothing but keep the Shuttle programme on the treadmill while pimping the Star Wars SDI boondoggle), Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower were running NASA. Those people showed leadership only in screwing the best thing America's ever done, our space programme. Obama deserves credit for keeping NASA going, even growing private industry into space the way Republicans would always lie about but never do. He will get that credit, and will do more to deserve more credit when reelected. Especially the fewer Republicans around to interfere with it.
The percentage of people who directly work for (and so are) the government who are elected politicans is smaller than the rounding error on the turnover of government employees. Most of what the government does is to enforce and obey laws, not make them.
They are expensive, their cost comes out of your budget, and they cause huge delays in your program.
Which your aerospace contractor insists be expensive, since your budget is charged cost-plus to the government/taxpayer. So your aerospace contractor wants its costs to rise, since that's the basis for its profits to rise. Which is why NASA wants to be expensive, because NASA's every move is scripted by lobbyists from aerospace contractors who write the legislation and budgets that control NASA.
It will indeed be good to get NASA out of a lot of that loop. Even though these private space companies like SpaceX will still be paid by NASA/taxpayer, they'll take some unindemnified risks and losses. Eventually they'll have enough private orbital infrastructure that the public will have only a purely regulatory role, not any expense role except enforcing the regulations. If we're lucky. More likely private space operations will have rid themselves of regulation entirely, and the only justice for people there will be what they can buy from the giant exoplanetary corporation.
As relativity explains, every point in the Universe is to some degree "near" any number of "large" masses, with the proportional gravity effect on/by them that Newton described.
It's easy to push a car with good bearings on level ground. I have pushed cars that weight over 10x my weight without any problem. And good bearings still have substantial friction compared to the air resistance inside an orbiting capsule, especially as the RPMs get up there with any speed. Otherwise cars would get far more MPG on cruise control than they do. Even lightweight, aerodynamic electric vehicles designed for maximum coasting still consume about 125W:Km.
It will be easy to get going, but somewhat hard to speed it up (just not as hard as when there's friction along the bottom enforced by gravity). It is exactly as easy/hard to slow and stop it.
In orbital microgravity, every action on a separate object requires either bracing oneself on infrastructure, or accepting the opposite reactive motion from what you pressed away, eventually contacting some infrastructure. This has been the case since the first orbit, though some spaces are getting bigger and the possibility of losing contact with infrastructure greater, requiring actual deliberate bracing more often.
It takes time and strength to stop the half-ton cargo load equal to the time and strength used to start it moving. As long as someone of similar power begins stopping it no later than halfway to the far bulkhead, it's no problem at all. In fact the push to start it should probably be pretty weak, as the spaces are small and there's no great rush, leaving the same or lesser strength able to overpower it in the event of a sudden recalculation of when and where it should stop.
All this will be second nature to astronauts with more than a few weeks' experience in microgravity. If not, the loads can be secured with cables at length to stop them before colliding, then released as they slow to as stop, or restrained if the stop doesn't go as planned.
I was very moved by the human element of the human ground crews roaring applause as the human arm pilot completed the capture.
I'm all for human space colonization and exploration. But I want to see all human presence preceded by machines either remotely controlled or (at real distances) autonomous. Their scouting, sensing and preparation (construction, cleaning, etc) will make the humans far more productive than when humans have to do everything manually.
AFAICT, the Falcon 9 rocket was disposable, so as its exhausted stages dropped away from the Dragon payload, they broke and burned up in the atmosphere, landing as scorching hot chunks and dust hopefully on unoccupied oceans. But couldn't they be shaped to break into steerable, durable chunks that sail down to land on the surface for collection? Making them less dense than water would also make the rocket lighter, a big benefit. All this seems to call for aerogels, the least dense synthetic material, which was developed for this purpose: reusable reentrant space vehicles, but all in one piece (ie. space shuttle). Send in an automated barge to scoop up the pieces, and the mission cycle impact on the Earth where we're all stuck is much lower.
This discussion wasn't about switching from Mac/Windows to Linux, but from Ubuntu to Mint. Mint replaced Unity in Ubuntu and passed the time savings to you so you wouldn't have to replace it yourself. You're wrong, and not even making sense now. Why are you still talking?
And even if switching to Linux can't save you time because you can't learn it fast enough to be worth the productivity increases, that's savings that you couldn't collect, even though it was passed to you. Plenty of other people, especially most of the people on Slashdot, show that the weak link is you, not Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
We can sequence genes. We can edit the sequence of many genes we've identified to switch the phenotype they express among meaningful choices. We can edit retroviruses to make them edit genes from A to B in living cells. We can combine sperm and egg IVF to produce a blastocyst. We can even insert full cell nuclei into collected foreign eggs, which we can cultivate into a blastocyst in a lab. We can convert skin cells into egg cells for that purpose.
How close are we to a synthetic womb that can gestate a full blastocyst into a newborn baby?
"De-evolving" = evolving.
Evolution is only the change in a genome over time. The human genome increasingly contains genetic values that it had less of before, as they were less able to reproduce. That is evolution. It's "de-evolution" only according to your values, which don't count in measuring genetic change.
Nazis don't care about the genetics. They care about scapegoating people powerless to fight back. And then using their example to terrorize each and any other group they construct as the next target. None are spared.
BTW "nationalist socialist" countries are everywhere. The US has always offered "socialism" (government enforced wealth redistribution) mainly to its richest, and is about the most nationalist country behind N Korea. The UK, Norway, Switzerland and many other European countries are pretty socialist, though more equitable in the wealth redistribution source/destination, and are so nationalist they refuse to join the EU. Japan is pretty nationalist, and more socialist than the US.
If you're going to scare people with "nazi", just say "nazi". Stop trying to scare people about socialism, as if the Nazi socialism was representative of socialism any more than East Germany's "People's Republic" represented its people. Nazism was founded on propaganda, and sympathetic propaganda outlets continue to peddle its slanders today.
Even when a complete genome sequence run costs the lab $1000, it's going to cost the patient $100,000 on their bill. Because nothing exists in the medical industry to reduce the prices charged to patients. Even insurance corps' leveraging their own and their cartel's buying power to reduce prices paid to medical providers then slap their own extreme charges and fees (and waste) to raise the retail cost back up.
Though not as much in Europe. So Europeans will get to consume American medical exports like quick, cheap sequencing technology. Evolution in action.
No point exists for which curvature is zero in all reference frames. Since any reference frame in the Universe that has a mass in it exerts gravity on each point, there is no point at which there is 0 gravity. That's why I agree with that previous post. It might be reaching pretty far, but that is the point of having comprehensive theories of gravity - they reach as far as there is.
Yes, that's why the world depends on New Zealand's opinion.
The US of course depends on its automotive industry to drive our entire manufacturing industry, the core of the US economy. Our manufacturing that is still by far the largest in the world, about 20% of global output. Manufacturing employs about 20% of American workers. We invent most of the world's manufacturing techniques, materials and responses like recycling; most of the rest of global manufacturing uses American machinery and feeds America's manufacturing supply chain.
The US automotive industry is the epitome of all that. New Zealanders bought more Ford Rangers last month than any other model car; 5 other Fords were in the NZ Top 25. GM isn't as popular in NZ, but it's the world's biggest car company again, over 10% larger than Toyota. Meanwhile my wife has 2000s Toyota that should have been recalled, and we've watched the later model years of them turn to crap we'd never buy.
And then there's all the great cars made in Germany, which evidently you've never heard of. America might indeed be in pretty deep trouble. But you better hope not. Because if America's manufacturing does collapse around a cratered car industry, we'll stop spending the money shooting movies Americans drive to see. Then your Top 25 will be dominated by classic 1980s Yugos.
The curvature is relative to other points, hence the name "relativity".
What we're talking about was the reply to the comment " gravity ain't zero at the space station" , that said "Gravity aint 0 anywhere in the universe." You say it is some places. I say it ain't.
No, relativity says that all mass in the universe acts on all the other mass, even though the effect moves at the speed of light which is pretty slow over most of the vast universe, but most of the mass has already curved space by now since it has existed for so long. Newton's gravitation also says that all masses act on each other. Both of which models support my point that every point in the universe is affected by gravity, and there is nowhere that is "absolute zero gravity" as the comment to which I replied claimed.
Your point is irrelevant. The point, to which you replied, is that using Mint instead of the user doing what Mint did to Ubuntu, saves time.
You just tried to move the goalposts again to your point. And then you tried to "just saying" your way into moving them again into disagreeing that installing Mint saves time over installing Ubuntu and changing it yourself. Moving the goalposts again. And moving them into just being wrong.
You don't even know what you're arguing about, and you're wrong on what you want to argue about. Helping you perpetuate it is distasteful. That's all the help from me you'll get.
It clearly matters who is president of America Inc. As I pointed out, Republican presidents of it are intolerable, while Democratic presidents of it suck, but are tolerable. There's plenty of other supporting data. Like the GDP and the stock market each growing faster under every Democratic president than Republicans, since Eisenhower. Of course we can always do better. Then there's the warmonger record, which Republicans dominate (except are roughly equal on Vietnam, which is now just a middling war). It's absolutely false that the two parties are equivalent. And when there are only two on the ballot that can govern, let alone win, we have to be honest about which one is an unacceptable choice.
Of course America was designed for the Congress to primarily determine how much the country sucks, and Republicans are the source of most of the suck. If we call them "Conservative" (and its "Libertarian" flavor that's really "corporate anarchy"), we can include the Democrats who make the case for equivalence. This is the problem. But it's far too easy, because it's wrong, to say that it doesn't matter which party rules. When Republicans rule, all but a few suffer and pay for it. When Democrats rule, far fewer suffer.
Because we didn't have nearly the amount of mall rentacops as we had real cops. They didn't have the power of real cops. They mostly didn't even have guns. They didn't get sent to face the kind of threats that real cops face.
You are talking nonsense, and it's perfectly clear your libertarian trance cannot be broken. Enjoy your paradise in Somalia. Goodbye.
What a completely naive statement, completely ignoring all the ways in which rentacops suck far worse than government cops. To the point where rentacops generally aren't allowed the kind of power that government cops are allowed.
You do listen to what you say before you try to convince someone with your anarchist word salads, right?
Indeed that is why Obama deserves credit. He continued the programme. Despite also handling a catastrophic economic collapse that literally threatened to delete America's main industrial engine, the automotive industry. It took a lot of political capital and risk to continue that programme, instead of just lying about it the way those other presidents did.
Again, it's not easy spending money on something like NASA when the country is flooded by propaganda calling any government spending "socialism" during the biggest economic collapse in a lifetime. Appointing someone against that headwind, and NASA getting its various work done especially since a Republican Congress has insisted on interfering with anything Obama could take credit for (including killing Binladen), was real leadership.
So it's a good thing Obama will be defeating Romney in 6 months. That makes it look a lot better than if Romney and his party of Bush, Bush, Reagan (who did nothing but keep the Shuttle programme on the treadmill while pimping the Star Wars SDI boondoggle), Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower were running NASA. Those people showed leadership only in screwing the best thing America's ever done, our space programme. Obama deserves credit for keeping NASA going, even growing private industry into space the way Republicans would always lie about but never do. He will get that credit, and will do more to deserve more credit when reelected. Especially the fewer Republicans around to interfere with it.
The percentage of people who directly work for (and so are) the government who are elected politicans is smaller than the rounding error on the turnover of government employees. Most of what the government does is to enforce and obey laws, not make them.
Which your aerospace contractor insists be expensive, since your budget is charged cost-plus to the government/taxpayer. So your aerospace contractor wants its costs to rise, since that's the basis for its profits to rise. Which is why NASA wants to be expensive, because NASA's every move is scripted by lobbyists from aerospace contractors who write the legislation and budgets that control NASA.
It will indeed be good to get NASA out of a lot of that loop. Even though these private space companies like SpaceX will still be paid by NASA/taxpayer, they'll take some unindemnified risks and losses. Eventually they'll have enough private orbital infrastructure that the public will have only a purely regulatory role, not any expense role except enforcing the regulations. If we're lucky. More likely private space operations will have rid themselves of regulation entirely, and the only justice for people there will be what they can buy from the giant exoplanetary corporation.
As relativity explains, every point in the Universe is to some degree "near" any number of "large" masses, with the proportional gravity effect on/by them that Newton described.
That's right - rentacops are so much better than government cops.
It's easy to push a car with good bearings on level ground. I have pushed cars that weight over 10x my weight without any problem. And good bearings still have substantial friction compared to the air resistance inside an orbiting capsule, especially as the RPMs get up there with any speed. Otherwise cars would get far more MPG on cruise control than they do. Even lightweight, aerodynamic electric vehicles designed for maximum coasting still consume about 125W:Km.
Yes, if you jump at a nearby wall you will split your skull. Even here on Earth.
The same person will stop and turn it with the same strength and time as they started it moving.
It will be easy to get going, but somewhat hard to speed it up (just not as hard as when there's friction along the bottom enforced by gravity). It is exactly as easy/hard to slow and stop it.
In orbital microgravity, every action on a separate object requires either bracing oneself on infrastructure, or accepting the opposite reactive motion from what you pressed away, eventually contacting some infrastructure. This has been the case since the first orbit, though some spaces are getting bigger and the possibility of losing contact with infrastructure greater, requiring actual deliberate bracing more often.
It takes time and strength to stop the half-ton cargo load equal to the time and strength used to start it moving. As long as someone of similar power begins stopping it no later than halfway to the far bulkhead, it's no problem at all. In fact the push to start it should probably be pretty weak, as the spaces are small and there's no great rush, leaving the same or lesser strength able to overpower it in the event of a sudden recalculation of when and where it should stop.
All this will be second nature to astronauts with more than a few weeks' experience in microgravity. If not, the loads can be secured with cables at length to stop them before colliding, then released as they slow to as stop, or restrained if the stop doesn't go as planned.
I was very moved by the human element of the human ground crews roaring applause as the human arm pilot completed the capture.
I'm all for human space colonization and exploration. But I want to see all human presence preceded by machines either remotely controlled or (at real distances) autonomous. Their scouting, sensing and preparation (construction, cleaning, etc) will make the humans far more productive than when humans have to do everything manually.
AFAICT, the Falcon 9 rocket was disposable, so as its exhausted stages dropped away from the Dragon payload, they broke and burned up in the atmosphere, landing as scorching hot chunks and dust hopefully on unoccupied oceans. But couldn't they be shaped to break into steerable, durable chunks that sail down to land on the surface for collection? Making them less dense than water would also make the rocket lighter, a big benefit. All this seems to call for aerogels, the least dense synthetic material, which was developed for this purpose: reusable reentrant space vehicles, but all in one piece (ie. space shuttle). Send in an automated barge to scoop up the pieces, and the mission cycle impact on the Earth where we're all stuck is much lower.
Why would I post as AC? I wasn't the asshole.
This discussion wasn't about switching from Mac/Windows to Linux, but from Ubuntu to Mint. Mint replaced Unity in Ubuntu and passed the time savings to you so you wouldn't have to replace it yourself. You're wrong, and not even making sense now. Why are you still talking?
And even if switching to Linux can't save you time because you can't learn it fast enough to be worth the productivity increases, that's savings that you couldn't collect, even though it was passed to you. Plenty of other people, especially most of the people on Slashdot, show that the weak link is you, not Linux.
You're a jackass and an asshole.